>>That is the classic behavior of the oplocks. It starts out giving the only user "exclusive" access. When the second user joins, the first users exclusive changes to shared. Then all users are equally slow. THAT is the normal. Exclusive use is an exceptional case and you will never get that performance across the shared users. The best thing is to disable oplocks and optimize for shared access. 15 seconds may be something you can really cut down on.
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>Mike, is there a way to programattically determine if oplocks is on/off?

I've never looked for that, but it probably exists.

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>Is it your experience that turning off oplocks has a particular success rate for improving performance? Usually? 50/50?

You're not going to like the answer. Oplocks tries to give the locks it determines the user needs. A single user needs single use it thinks, which is a really simplistic determination. That applies for a word document. In fact, a multi-user app NEVER needs single user. A multi-user app will be SLOWER due to sharing. I'd rather have it consistently slow for all users and have an attainable goal of optimization and performance, than to have some users experience occasional better performance which can never be given to all users.

However, if you switch to a hosted environment, then all users will get better performance, like SQL Server, except you then have the potential of screen refreshes causing performance problems and slow connections from the "terminals" to the host server.